No Heroes (22 page)

I clung to my students' disappointment as a balm to my own sense of despair. Perhaps providing hope was better than I had imagined.

I met an American tank column. A Jewish fellow from New York gave me a submachine gun because he recognized that I was a Jewish prisoner. I liked that machine gun. I wanted to feel the metal on me. That was a very nice weapon, very handy. The weapon they shot all those guys with on that hill in Plaszow. Very little recoil. Very well designed.

I walked into a house to get rid of my camp uniform. The potatoes on the stove were warm. Very nice house, beautiful piano in the living room, nice clothing, and a flight jacket. I took the flight jacket, played the piano for a while, took the potatoes, and walked out of the house.

I want someone to talk to because now I'm lonely. Everybody's gone. I don't want to get caught outside. I want to go for the night into a house. I knock on the door and a woman opens it and she told me not to shoot.

I didn't want to shoot anybody. I had just gotten out of prison. I was hungry and cold. I hadn't eaten in days, and I looked like a mess. I smelled. I weighed less than a hundred pounds. I said, could you warm the potatoes for me? I don't want any food from you. Just warm the potatoes for me.

She said she had no coal. She didn't want to let me in, but her daughter lets me in. They gave me a room. The room was warm. I hadn't slept in a bed in five years. They gave me this beautiful room with this beautiful view. But I heard a noise. I said, who's in the cellar? She said, nobody. I want to know what's going on in the house, because I didn't want to go to sleep and get killed. So I opened the door to the cellar, and it was full of German soldiers. They said, please don't shoot.

They had enough of war. And I had enough of war. I didn't know who they were. SS. Army. Air force. I didn't shoot. I closed the door and went to bed prepared to die. I never slept that well in my life.

The next day an ambulance drives me to a makeshift hospital in a beautiful hotel taken over by the Americans. I was dying. Finally I was dying. I waited all that time, but the nurses didn't let me. The Americans brought me back to life.

I wasn't happy. I don't feel good, I'm very weak. I don't want to go out in the world. I get a doctor to sign that I have TB and I go to a sanatorium. I had a bed for myself. I befriend the doctors, I befriend the nurse. Everything is okay. One problem, I really don't have anything to live for, because I don't think that anybody's alive out of my family.

One day a young boy comes and says are you Arthur Gross?

Yes, I'm Arthur Gross.

Is your wife Irene?

Yes.

Your wife is in Kraków and I came to Germany to look for you. She will be so happy to know that you're alive. I'm going back to Poland to tell her.

That was that boy my wife saved, Elie Kupiec. A couple weeks later, somebody called me from the office. There's a lady waiting for you at the gate. And there she was! She looked very good to me, very good to me. She always looked clean and combed. My beautiful wife.

After the war I came to Kraków, looking for Arthur, and there was nobody there. Nobody I know. In ghetto, when I feel like a little unsure of myself, Arthur always said, after the war go to Kraków and we meet. So I did. But no Arthur.

And then somebody like six foot tall approached me and asked me if I know Irene Gross. I said, that's me.

He said, do you remember me?

No.

You saved my life. I would like to repay you.

It was Elie Kupiec, all grown up. No more fitting under the clothes. He went to Germany and came back to Poland and told me Arthur is in a TB sanatorium.

I packed myself and to Arthur I go. I went on a train. The border we had to go across at Czechoslovakia. The soldiers were watching like they always do. We were walking on the side, away from the soldiers. We cross at night a fence. There was a hole. I was not very physical but I climbed through, somebody was pushing my tush in the back. It was scary. Very scary. The dogs were around and barking like crazy. There was a lot of yelling. Other people were going across and were caught. It was night. We ran until there was a German village and there we stopped. I was twenty-two. Pretty young.

The next day I found Arthur. He was weak like they killed him. He was very good-looking. He still is, but he was really good-looking then.

I showed him my wedding ring. He couldn't believe it. He said, is it the same one?

Yes.

How could you keep it.

I hid it the whole time in the one place a woman has to hide something in.

Waugh, that's why I lost mine. I don't have that place.

Elie I didn't see again. I didn't hear from him, nothing, absolutely nothing. I think he went to Israel, to fight for independence.

I sent Eugene a letter encouraging him to continue his writing. I also helped Sandra transfer to a better school, or, as she said, “a real school.” She appreciated my phone calls and letters on her behalf, telling me it was the most effort any teacher had exerted for her. I was proud until I realized just how minor it was in light of my ambition a few months prior. I told myself that I had tried, but I often wondered if this was true. I'd gotten deeply discouraged and turned tail at the first opportunity. My dreams of home lay in shards.

I made a final trip to town for packing supplies. Snubbing the mall, I drove several miles out of my way to pay higher prices in Morehead, then strolled along the campus. The buildings were the same but several trees were gone, including the tall fir that was decorated every winter with lights. A construction site had replaced the trees with a concrete wall, ramp, and steps leading to a stone gazebo. A maintenance worker I didn't recognize was planting shrubs at the base of the five-foot wall.

“Hey,” I said. “What is this thing?”

“Aw, just some bunch of brick we got to take care of.”

“What's it supposed to be?”

“Well,” he said, “they're a-calling it a bell tower.”

“Kind of low for a tower.”

“I'd say so,” he said, “but I ain't never seen a real one. Maybe some come low.”

“Where's the bell?”

“They ain't no bell. They got speakers. Supposed to be loud ones.”

“Well,” I said.

“This whole thing run a million dollars. Some rich lady from Lexington gave the money.”

“For a bell that don't work.”

“Yup.” The man grinned. “And a short tower.”

“Didn't anybody say something about chopping all the trees down?”

“They put us to doing it when the students were gone. They was some to get upset, but it didn't do no good. You can't put back a tree.”

“You sure as hell can't.”

“I'll thank you not to talk that way.”

“What?”

“Bad language and such.”

“Sorry,” I said. “See you.”

He nodded and I continued my walk, his request a reminder of where I was—not merely in the Bible Belt, but smack dab in the middle of its giant buckle. I was going to miss the woods, but not the constant self-oppression.

There is a children's model that you assemble with glue called The Visible Man, a transparent shell containing the organs of a human. As I walked the crooked Main Street, I felt as if my body was exposed, my nervous system raw to the wind, my heart on view. Only my mind remained hidden. I was The Visible Ghost, recognized by people I knew twenty years ago, ignored by everyone else.

My favorite spot in town was on the courthouse lawn, sitting behind a monument that honored fallen soldiers. A statue of a doughboy strode through a jumble of barbed wire. He was perpetually heading east toward the hills that hemmed the town. Fastened to the base of the statue was a list of fallen soldiers, their last names as familiar as the sound of rain. It was hometowns that enraptured me with awe—Hilda, Craney, Yale, Smile—names I had never heard. Where in Rowan County was the community of Smile? Eventually people wouldn't know where Haldeman was. They will study a map or a plaque or a book and find a reference to a town that no longer exists. My hometown will be a land of ghosts.

See what the town is, I told myself, not what it was. I opened my notebook and dutifully recorded what appeared before me. The paint on Progress Hall was peeling. Bauson's was a pizza joint, the courthouse was a tourist attraction, and the old jail was used for city storage. Behind it, a manhole cover had been seeping raw sewage into the street for two months. Cars drove through it and people walked in it. Directly above it hung a sign welcoming parents to Morehead State University.

Suddenly a voice yelled at me.

“You writing a book?”

I recognized a boy from childhood who had inexplicably become a grown man driving a huge truck.

“You bet,” I said.

“I thought that's what you was up to.”

“You want to be in it?”

“Hell, yes,” he said. “I'll give you a beer.”

“All right. You're in.”

“Write me a whole chapter and you can have a shot at my old lady. But it ain't as good as everybody says.”

I laughed and the light changed.

“See you, buddy,” he shouted, and drove away.

I left the statue and walked half a block to visit the library. Frankie was gone and I wrote her a note. As I was leaving, my seventh-grade teacher pushed open the heavy doors. Mr. Ellington seemed extremely tall when I was a kid; now he appeared to have shrunk. As the only male teacher at Haldeman School, he enjoyed special status as auxiliary bus driver, stern disciplinarian, and favored teacher of the boys. He brought enough pocket knives for each boy to have one, then showed us how to carve soap. Sometimes students gave Mr. Ellington broken guns that he repaired at home.

One day each year he came to school wearing a buckskin shirt and leggings he made from a deer he'd shot. From his belt hung a powderhorn, a bullet pouch, and a leather bag containing flint and wadding. He also carried a Bowie knife and a tomahawk, which he could throw with remarkable accuracy. He fired his long rifle out the classroom window so we could see the twin puffs of smoke—-one from the powder igniting in the pan, and the second billowing from the muzzle.

“Mr. Ellington,” I said. “Is that you?”

He nodded, staring hard at my face, trying to place me amid forty years of children exchanging places in his classroom.

“I'm Chris Offutt,” I said. “From Haldeman.”

“Chris,” he said. “How are you getting along? I heard you were in.”

“That's right.”

“I'm here every day. I mainly read Louis L'Amour.”

“I've read him.”

“Would you like to see my pride and joy?”

I nodded and he opened his wallet. I expected to see a sports car because he had the reputation of a leadfoot. Instead he pulled out a color photograph of a bottle of the dishwasher fluid Pride, beside a bottle of the detergent Joy. He chuckled, holding the thin bridge of his nose between a long bony forefinger and thumb, a familiar gesture.